THE SADNESS OF THE BORDER WALL

THE SADNESS OF THE BORDER WALL
By David Bacon
Contexts, 3/22/17
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1536504217696064
https://contexts.org/ 

In Playas de Tijuana, on the Mexican side of the border wall between Mexico and the U.S., Catelina Cespedes and Carlos Alcaide greet Florita Galvez, who is on the U.S. side. The family came from Santa Monica Cohetzala in Puebla to meet at the wall.


It took two days on the bus for Catalina Cespedes and her husband Teodolo Torres to get from their hometown in Puebla - Santa Monica Cohetzala - to Tijuana.  On a bright Sunday in May they went to the beach at Playas de Tijuana.  There the wall separating Mexico from the United States plunges down a steep hillside and levels off at the Parque de Amistad, or Friendship Park, before crossing the sand and heading out into the Pacific surf. 

Sunday is the day for families to meet through the border wall.  The couple had come to see their daughter, Florita Galvez. 

Florita Galvez is on the U.S. side of the border wall between Mexico and the U.S., and her family on the Mexican side can only see her through holes in the metal mesh.


Florita had arrived that day in San Ysidro, the border town a half hour south of San Diego.  Then she went out to the Border Field State Park, by the ocean two miles west of town.  From the parking lot at the park entrance it was a 20-minute walk down a dirt road to the section of the wall next to the Parque de Amistad.

At 11 that morning, Catalina and Florita finally met, separated by the metal border.  They looked at each other through the metal screen that covers the wall's bars, in the small area where people on the U.S. side can actually get next to it.  And they touched.  Catalina pushed a finger through one of the screen's half-inch square holes.  On the other side, Florita touched it with her own finger. 

On the Mexican side of the border wall Catelina Cespedes sticks her finger through a hole in the mesh so that she can touch the finger of her daughter, Florita Galvez, who is on the other side, the only physical contact possible between people on each side.


Another family shared the space with Catalina and Teodolo.  Adriana Arzola had brought her baby Nazeli Santana, now several months old, to meet her family living on the U.S. side for the first time.  Adriana had family with her also - her grandmother and grandfather, two older children and a brother and sister. 

It was very frustrating, though, to try to see people on the other side through the half-inch holes.  So they moved along the wall to a place where the screen ended.  There the vertical eighteen-foot iron bars of the wall - what the wall is made of in most places - are separated by spaces about four inches wide.  Family members in the U.S. could see the baby as Adriana held her up.

But only from a distance.  The rules imposed by the U.S. Border Patrol in Border Field State Park say that where there's no screen the family members on that side have to stay several feet away from the wall.  So no touching.

Adriana Arzola, her sister and her baby Nayeli Santana talk with her family living in the U.S. through the bars of the wall.  On the U.S. side, her family has to stay several feet away from the wall, so they can't touch each other through the bars.


I could see the sweep of emotions playing across the faces of everyone, and in their body language.  One minute the grandmother was laughing, and the next there were tears in her eyes.  The grandfather just smiled and smiled.  Adriana talked to her relatives, and tried to wake the baby up.  Her brother leaned on the bars with his arms folded against his eyes, and her sister turned away, overcome by sadness.  On the U.S. side, a man in a wheelchair and two women with him looked happy just to have a chance to see their family again.

Some volunteers, most from the U.S. side, called Friends of Friendship Park, have tried to make the Mexican side more pleasant and accommodating for families.  The older children with Adriana sat at concrete picnic tables.  While family members talked through the wall they used colored markers, provided by the Friends, to make faces and write messages on smooth rocks.  Around them were the beginnings of a vegetable garden.  Later in the afternoon one of the volunteers harvested some greens for a salad. 

At the Parque de Amistad, or Friendship Park, in Playas de Tijuana, children and families write on stones the names of other family members they're separated from because of the border.


Members of the Friends group include Pedro Rios from the U.S./Mexico Border Program of the American Friends Service Committee, and Jill Holslin, a photographer and border activist.  On the U.S. side, another of the participating groups - Angeles de la Frontera, or Border Angels, helped the families that came to the park.  "We're here seven or eight times a month," said Enrique Morones, the group's director.  "People get in touch with us because we're visible, or they know someone else we helped before."  Border Angels helps set up the logistics so that families can arrive on both sides at the same time, often coming from far away.

Weekend visiting hours, from10-2, are the only time the Border Patrol allows families to get close to the wall for the reunions.  Once a year they open a doorway in the wall.  Watched closely by BP agents, family members are allowed to approach the open door one by one, and then to hug a mother or father, a son or daughter, or another family member from the other side.  To do that, people have to fill in a form and show the agents they have legal status in the U.S.  During the rest of the year, the Border Patrol doesn't ask about legal status, although they could at any moment.  For that reason, Border Angels tells families not to go on their own.

On the Mexican side of the border wall Adriana Arzola brings her new baby, Nayeli Santana, to meet her family living in the U.S. for the first time.


Such carefully co ntrolled and brief encounters are the ultimate conclusion of a process that, at its beginning, had no controls at all.  Before 1848 there was no border here whatsoever.  That year, at the conclusion of what the U.S. calls "the Mexican War," the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico was forced to give up 529,000 square miles of its territory.  The U.S. paid, in theory, $15,000,000 for the land, but then simply deducted it from the debt it claimed Mexico owed it.  U.S. troops occupied Mexico City to force the government there to sign the treaty.

The so-called "Mexican Cession" accounts for 14.9% of the total land area of the United States, including the entire states of California, Nevada and Utah, almost all of Arizona, half of New Mexico, a quarter of Colorado and a piece of Wyoming.  Some Congress members even called for annexing all of Mexico. 

At the time, the city of San Diego was a tiny unincorporated settlement of a few hundred people.  It was considered a suburb of Los Angeles, then still a small town.  San Ysidro didn't exist, nor did Tijuana.  To mark the new border, in 1849 a U.S./Mexico boundary commission put a marble monument in the shape of a skinny pyramid where they thought the line should go.  A replica of that original pyramid today sits next to the wall in the Parque de Amistad.  On the U.S. side the road leading from San Ysidro to Boundary Field State Park is named Monument Road, and the area is called Monument Mesa.

A boy walks past the Mexican side of the border wall between Mexico and the U.S.


Early tourists chipped so many pieces from the marble pyramid that it had to be replaced in 1894.  The first fence was erected, not along the borderline, but around the new monument to keep people from defacing it.  The line itself was still unmarked, fifty years after it had been created.

The Border Patrol was organized in 1924.  Before that, there was no conception that passage back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. on Monument Mesa had to be restricted.  The Federal government only assumed control over immigration in 1890, when construction began on the first immigration station at Ellis Island in New York harbor.  Racial exclusions existed in U.S. law from the late 1800s, but the requirement that people have a visa to cross the border was only established by the Immigration Act of 1924.  The law also established a racist national quota system for handing visas out. 

In the 1930s the Border Patrol terrorized barrios across the U.S., putting thousands of Mexicans into railroad cars and dumping them across the border.  Even U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, or people who just looked Mexican, were swept up and deported.  Trains carried deportees to the border stations in San Ysidro and Calexico, but on Monument Mesa there was still no formal line to keep people from returning.

A man looks through the bars of the border wall into the U.S.


That changed for the first time after World War Two, when barbed wire was stretched from San Ysidro to the ocean.  Mexicans called it the "alambre," or the wire.  Those who crossed it became "alambristas."  Yet enforcement was still not very strict.  During the 1950s and early 1960s, thousands of Mexican workers were imported to the U.S. as braceros, while many migrants also came without papers.  In the Imperial Valley, on weekends during the harvest, those workers would walk into Mexicali, on the Mexican side, to hear a hot band or go dancing, and then hitch a ride back to sleep in their labor camps in Brawley or Holtville. 

In 1971, Pat Nixon, wife of Republican President Richard Nixon, inaugurated Border Field State Park.  The day she visited, she asked the Border Patrol to cut the barbed wire so she could greet the Mexicans who'd come to see her.  She told them, "I hope there won't be a fence here too much longer." 

Instead, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986.  Although many people remember the law for its amnesty for undocumented immigrants, IRCA also began the process of dumping huge resources into border enforcement. A real fence was built in the early 1990s, made of metal sheets taken from decommissioned aircraft carrier landing platforms.  The sheets had holes, so someone could peek through.  But for the first time, people coming from each side could no longer physically mix together or hug each other. 

On the Mexican side of the border wall between Mexico and the U.S., the wall runs into the Pacific Ocean.


That old wall still exists on the Mexican side in Tijuana and elsewhere on the border.  But Operation Gatekeeper, the Clinton Administration border enforcement program, sought to push border crossers out of urban areas like San Ysidro, into remote desert regions where crossing was much more difficult and dangerous.  To do that, the government had contractors build a series of walls that were harder to cross. 

On Monument Mesa the aircraft landing strips were replaced in 2007 by the 18-foot wall of vertical metal columns.  Two years later a second wall was built on the U.S. side behind the first.  The area between them became a security zone where the Border Patrol restricts access to the wall itself to just four hours on Saturday and Sunday.  The metal columns were extended into the Pacific surf.

In Playas, though, the wall is just a sight to see for the hundreds of people who come out to the beach on the weekend.  The seafood restaurants are jammed, and sunbathers set up their umbrellas on the sand.  Occasionally, a curious visitor will walk up and look through the bars into the U.S., or have a boyfriend or girlfriend take a picture next to the wall, uploading it to Facebook or Instagram for their friends.

On the Mexican side of the border wall veterans of U.S. military service who have been deported gather to protest, and to remember those who died.  Their names are written on the bars.


The wall itself at the Parque de Amistad has become a changing artwork.  As the bars rust, they've been painted with graffiti that protests the brutal division. 

One section has the names of U.S. military veterans who've been deported to Mexico, with the dates of their service and death.  A deported veterans group comes down on occasional Sundays, with some in uniform.  In angry voices, they ask why fighting the U.S.'s wars didn't keep them from being pushed onto the Mexican side of the wall.

HOTEL WORKERS GOT IT RIGHT

HOTEL WORKERS GOT IT RIGHT
In photos and text:  The great San Francisco hotel lockout
By David Bacon

The full set of photos is viewable here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72157677437755884/with/33087573101/

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 6SEPTEMBER04 -  On Labor Day, at the beginning of the campaign for a new contract, hotel housekeepers and other hotel workers march up Powell Street in front of the St. Francis Hotel, in the heart of the hotel and tourism district.


During the great San Francisco hotel lockout, the progressive leaders of the American Anthropological Association responded to the request of San Francisco hotel workers that they move their annual convention, because the hotels were being boycotted.  The association agreed, and the convention was moved.  There was a lot of controversy internally about the decision, and at the convention in 2009 they organized a panel to talk about the strike, and about the links between labor and progressive anthorpology. I was asked to write an account of the fight for CIty and Society, where this appeared in 2009.  Two other contributions also discussed this issue:  "Toward an Anthropology of Labor" by Sharryn Kasmir and "Locating Labor: David Bacon and Anthropology" by Gerrie Casey.

The lockout and the two year fight that followed took place at the height of the George Bush administration.  Despite Republican domination of the government and savage attacks on unions, workers and immigrants, the hotel union doggedly developed a strategy to unite workers nationwide.  The union showed (and it is clear in these photographs) that workers in San Francisco would fight hard for it, and that winning was possible even under a rightwing administration.  Revisiting the history of the lockout can help to envision a strategy for unions and immigrants facing similar challenges today.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 6SEPTEMBER04 - Workers and supporters get arrested in front of the St. Francis Hotel.


The 2004 strike and lockout of San Francisco hotel workers, and the two-year struggle that followed, weren't just limited disputes over wages-a union in a strong labor town getting serious money for its members. Some of the hotel workers' hardest-fought achievements didn't involve money at all, at least not directly. Instead, their new contract, finally signed in 2006, put in place building blocks that made hotel labor much stronger in years that followed-coordinated bargaining, card check recognition, and civil rights protection balancing the needs of immigrants and African Americans.

Perhaps the best explanation for why the hotels signed the agreement was given by UNITE HERE Local 2 president Mike Casey who simply said, "they decided it was cheaper to sign a contract than go to war with us again."

The final settlement certainly cost the hotels a bundle. Not only did wages rise a dollar an hour for each of three years for most workers (half that for those who get tips), but the big chains- Hilton, Hyatt, Intercontinental and Starwood- even threw in 60 cents an hour retroactively for each of the prior two years when the union lived without a contract at all. Poetic justice, since it was the hotels' choice in 2004 to refuse to sign an agreement that had them negotiating a new contract in 2006. It was expensive justice nonetheless.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 6SEPTEMBER04 - Mike Casey, president of Unitehere Local 2,  is photographed by the police at the paddy wagon, after being arrested in front of the St. Francis Hotel.


The bigger question, however, was whether a new balance of power in hotels would make housekeepers and cooks the inheritors of the city's waterfront labor tradition, and lead to the kind of rise in the standard of living that longshoremen experienced decades ago. Like the hospitality workers of today, dockworkers of the 1920s were San Francisco's low-wage earners-even scorned as bums and derelicts. Eighty years later, they are some of the best-paid blue-collar workers in North America. A strong union in the 1930s and '40s knitted waterfront and maritime laborers together in every Pacific port. It gave workers a new way to deal with the shippers, and with each other. A radically higher standard of living was one visible manifestation of better organization. The political machine in San Francisco and Hawaii, which sent a generation of pro-labor politicians to Washington, was another.

It could happen again, and hotel workers may be the ones to make it happen. Certainly in San Francisco their union avoided the disasters of the earlier 2003 Southern California grocery strike, and the wage and workforce cuts plaguing the nation's airlines. But the union did more than fight a good defensive battle. It changed the rules. It altered the relationship between hospitality workers and the multinational corporations who now employ them.

If the hotels learned anything from the two-year saga, it was that the union in San Francisco was better prepared for war than they were. In 2004, Local 2 asked for a contract that would terminate in 2006, enabling it to negotiate at the same time its sister locals around the country were also at the bargaining table with the same hospitality chains. Earlier in 2004, the hotels agreed to a 2006 expiration date in a number of major cities. But by the time the San Francisco union demanded it, they'd realized their mistake and become badly scared. The notion that independent local unions, which previously could be defeated easily in local strikes, would band together to negotiate jointly, was an extremely threatening idea for the hotel companies. Common contract expirations might eventually lead to joint negotiations, multi-city strikes, and even, in the longer term, national master agreements.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 14SEPTEMBER04 - Three workers talk about how to vote and mark their ballots in the strike vote.  Hotel workers in Los Angeles and Washington DC also took strike votes the day prior, making a 3-city strike very likely.


So in San Francisco the companies balked.

Choosing this city and this union was a bad mistake. While hotel operators were able to get 2006 off the table in Washington DC, and weaken the momentum elsewhere, San Francisco hotel workers held to their guns. They struck four of the fourteen Class A hotels (the city's most expensive) in the Multi-Employer Group, announcing they'd stay out for two weeks. The other ten implemented a mutual support agreement, and promptly locked out their own workers. Once the two-week strike was over, workers in the struck hotels were locked out too when they tried to return. The hotels obviously saw no contradiction between their gentlemen's agreement to lock arms in an anti-union alliance, and their opposition to local unions showing the same mutual support.

Workers did, though. To them it smacked of hypocrisy, and made them more willing to stay on the picket lines.

As it ground on, the lockout did more damage to the hotels than to their employees. After nine weeks, workers were clearly not frightened, and continued to mount noisy picket lines and drive away guests. When the hotels cut off payments to the union health plan, other unions stepped in to make up for them. Management's own tactics pushed people together, and made broader class solidarity more necessary than ever.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 29SEPTEMBER04 - A Hilton Hotel striker carries her infant on the picketline in front of the hotel lobby.


At the same time, the hotels had a hard time with their own business allies. The city's mayor, a photogenic, TV-savvy restaurateur, heretofore viewed as business friendly, tried to broker a settlement. The corporations' rebuff carried a resentful tone, as though he was betraying those who'd propelled him into office. Mayor Gavin Newsom then went to a picket line at Union Square, in the heart of the tourist district. In front of the Westin St. Francis he declared the lockout was hurting city business, and that he would honor the union boycott of the fourteen hotels until they settled.

The hotel corporations finally caved and reopened their doors to their own workers. The mayor kept his promise, however, and stayed away for the next two years. And as room occupancy rates rose nationally, with the industry recovering from its disastrous decline in the wake of September 11, 2001, an active boycott cut deeply into San Francisco's expected share of sharply rising profits.

Hotel housekeepers, bellmen, cooks, and laundry workers returned to their jobs, but without a contract. To pressure them further, the companies refused to deduct dues and turn the money over to the union. Rather than watch its income plummet in the middle of this battle, however, the union set up a system to collect dues by hand from over 5,000 workers. In the end, "it brought us much closer to our own members," said Local 2's secretary-treasurer Lamoin Wehrlein-Jaen.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 13OCTOBER04 - Local 2 President Mike Casey leads workers and supporters to the entrance of the Mark Hopkins Hotel to demand that managers let them go back to work.  Fourteen hotels locked out their workers when they tried to return to work at the end of the two-week strike against four of them.  Hotel managers then extended the lockout indefinitely in all 14 Class A hotels. 


Action in the street continued. Noisy marches reminded managers and travel agents of what a return to war would feel like. Arrests of dozens of members and supporters for sitting in hotel entrances became San Francisco's annual Labor Day observance. And inside the hotels, workers began to use delegations, petitions, and other collective actions when they had problems on the job. The official position of the Multi-Employer Group-that since there was no contract, there was no grievance procedure-created more worker cohesion, not less. 2006 finally arrived, and union contracts began to expire in other cities around the country. Local 2 was ready to fight again. The hotels were not.

Negotiations, which had stalled not long after the lockout ended, were restarted from scratch. Hotels demanded that new hires receive an inferior medical plan, and pay more for it-the same basic demand which led to the four-month strike of 40,000 grocery workers in Los Angeles in 2003, and which store clerks in the end had to accept. Local 2 put its old demands back on the table.

This time, however, the parent union's national strategy began to have an effect in San Francisco. The huge New York local, UNITE HERE's largest, reached agreement in May. It was a six-year deal, meaning that the union would not be a factor in the next round of negotiations. But New York won substantial raises, and most important, card-check recognition.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 13OCTOBER04 - Workers at the Fairmount wait to find out if they're going to work, as the lockout begins.


Of all the union demands, this was anathema to the hospitality chains. Under a card-check arrangement, workers at non-union hotels run by the same company can sign cards asking for union representation. When a majority has signed, the hotel agrees to recognize the union and bargain. This process avoids National Labor Relations Board elections, which, over two decades, have become a vehicle for scorched-earth anti-union campaigns. Managers facing workers who want a union first hire anti-union consultants. They, in turn, wage a campaign of illegal threats and firings, designed to produce a momentary majority of workers on election day, so scared that they vote against their own self-interest.

UNITE HERE has card-check agreements in Las Vegas, where it represents such a large percentage of the casino workforce that the wealthy operators have no choice but to agree. In the rest of the hotel industry, however, union busting is the norm. In San Francisco, it took Local 2 over four years to organize the Parc 55, and at Marriott Corporation's downtown flagship, the campaign lasted ten.

Ironically, Hilton Hotels broke the logjam in New York. In the 2004 lockout, Hilton led the other MEG employers in San Francisco in defying Local 2. In UNITE HERE's pre-2006 planning, Hilton had even been chosen as the national target. Workers were interviewed around the country, and their testimony supported a growing indictment of worker abuse, especially in non-union hotels.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 12OCTOBER04 - Rev. Jesse Jackson rallies with locked out and striking San Francisco hotel workers in Union Square.


Following the company's decade-long binge of buying out smaller chains, a majority of Hilton workers are now unorganized. By moving from a majority-union to a majority non-union workforce, the company has begun to push wages and conditions down, even for unionized workers. Local 2's members understood this. Without organizing their non-union colleagues, they too would feel the same pressure. They recognized that a new contract had to have more than just wage raises. It had to include a better process for bringing unorganized workers into the union.

Local 2's housekeepers and kitchen workers understood power. They knew the advantage they would have if they could force the hotels to negotiate in 2006. They knew why they needed card check. They could have given up these two demands anytime during the nine locked-out weeks, or the two years without a contract that followed. The hotels would have gladly given them raises in exchange. But in a convincing demonstration of the union's ability to educate its own members, the workers wouldn't take the deal.

When New York's new contract was ratified, the union and Hilton also announced that the chain was willing to sign card check agreements in a limited number of other cities. Those agreements would have to be included in new contracts in each of those cities, though, and in San Francisco those negotiations were not going well.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 22OCTOBER04 - Locked-out hotel workers rally in front of City Hall, before calling on city supervisors to take action to end the lockout.


Finally, Local 2 took another strike vote on August 24, 2006. A week later, at the end of a noisy march through the tourist district, over sixty members and supporters were arrested for blocking the entrance to the Palace Hotel on Market Street. Managers could envision the possible return of the labor war of two years before. In the shifting alliances inside the Multi-Employer Group, Hilton and its allies succeeded in convincing a majority of the other operators that they could live with card check in San Francisco.

Workers held out for a third strategic goal, however, which may eventually have as profound an effect on the union's strength as card check and common expiration dates. They negotiated an unprecedented civil rights section of the new agreement, which combines protection for immigrant workers with a requirement that hotels make concerted efforts to hire African American workers and residents of other communities underrepresented in the industry's workforce.

The proposal stems from an effort by the union to address changing demographics. In the city's hotels, the percent- age of African American workers is falling, as employment continues to grow. African Americans now make up less than 6 percent of the San Francisco hotel workforce, a number that has declined in each of the past five years but one.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 22OCTOBER04 - One locked-out hotel worker holds her infant as she speaks in a meeting of city supervisors, asking them to take action to end the lockout. 


In San Francisco, this issue has a lot of history. The Palace Hotel was the scene of the city's most famous civil rights demonstration. In 1963, hundreds of civil rights activists sat in and were arrested in the hotel lobby. They demanded that management hire blacks into jobs in the visible front-of-the-house locations, where the color line had kept them out. The day after the arrests thousands ringed the entire block in the largest picket line San Francisco has ever seen.

Richard Lee Mason, an African American banquet waiter at the St. Francis remembers: "African Americans had been kept in the back of the house for far too long. People wanted to be in the front of the house, and rightly so." Employment prospects improved for black workers for some years after the demonstrations, but the situation changed again in the 1980s.

"I suspect that because the industry had had a great struggle with African Americans, they thought we were too aggressive," Mason speculates. "A lot of us had come out of the civil rights movement, and we were willing to fight for higher wages and to make sure we were treated fairly." Steven Pitts, an economist at the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California in Berkeley, adds that "this perception by employers of African American workers is true nationwide. Blacks aren't perceived as compliant, and therefore when many employers make hiring decisions, they simply don't hire them."

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 26OCTOBER04 - San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom listens to Lesli Salmeron, a housekeeper at the Hilton hotel for over 9 years, about the suffering of workers caused by the lockout.  The mayor joined locked-out workers on their picketlines after hotels rejected his appeal to end the lockout.


Hotels hired increasing percentages of immigrants, in a move they hoped would create a less demanding and expensive workforce. In kitchens and among the laundry carts, voices now speak in languages from Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean, China, the Philippines, and a host of other countries. But if the hotel industry hoped this new workforce would be more compliant, they were disappointed. Immigrants proved a key element of the 1980 citywide hotel strike, and smaller conflicts over the following two decades. But black employment fell nonetheless.

To restart movement in the other direction, in 2004 Local 2 asked companies to agree to a diversity taskforce, to reach out to African American communities, and eliminate hiring barriers. While demanding progress towards ending the de facto color line, the union also proposed new protections for the job rights of immigrants. The union won strong language allowing workers to keep their jobs for up to a year if they have to leave to adjust their immigration status. Management is prohibited from firing workers named in "no match" letters from the Social Security Administration, because their numbers don't match the SSA database (a common cause for termination by employers who assume those workers are undocumented.)

The union proposal strengthened an important ruling won in 2000 in San Francisco, when an arbitrator held that management couldn't use a "no-match letter" to fire immigrant workers if they had a union contract. Then, in 2003, the union organized the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, a national demonstration for immigration reform joining immigrants with black veterans of the original 1960s freedom rides. The mobilization brought people to Washington to push for immigration reform to make it easier for immigrant workers to join unions, go on strike, and advocate for their labor rights.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 5NOVEMBER04 - At a prayer service outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel hotel workers put their anger into writing on the signs they carry on the picketline.


The union's civil rights proposal "is an important first step," according to Pitts. "But in the civil rights movement we learned we need structural change, that can bring community residents into the hotels, and make sure they progress." The new outreach requirement may have limited impact, but it is a first step. It puts immigrants and African Americans on the same side. It makes the union part of a new civil rights movement, geared to a changed world of globalization. The key is prohibiting discrimination against immigrants because of their status, while moving towards affirmative action to gain more jobs for underrepresented communities.

Winning structural reform in hiring takes a lot of bargaining power-an important argument for card check and coordinated negotiations in cities around the country. But possibly more important in the long term, the agreement renews the basis for a civil rights alliance that can lead to greater political power, as well as increasing union strength.

In the 1934 San Francisco general strike, longshore leader Harry Bridges promised African Americans in the city that if they made common cause with the strikers rather than with the ship owners, the union would force employers to take down the color line that barred them from most waterfront jobs. As president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Bridges kept his word. African Americans became a majority of San Francisco longshore workers in later years, and the union and minority and working-class communities formed an alliance that gave them decades of political power.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 5NOVEMBER04 - A hotel housekeeper shouts out her anger at the continuation of the lockout, at the door into the St. Francis Hotel.


Local 2 may become the nucleus of a similar political alliance that reflects the new realities of the city's changing demographics. That could give it influence, in raising the standard of living for not just its members but for working-class San Franciscans as a whole.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 20NOVEMBER04 - Mayor Gavin Newsom announces the end to the lockout, flanked by (l) and Mike Casey, president of UNITE HERE Local 2 (r).

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 5SEPTEMBER05 - UNITE HERE President John Wilhelm sits in with workers, blocking the doors, to the Grand Hyatt Hotel, protesting the lack of a union contract at  San Francisco's Class A hotels. 

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - 13SEPTEMBER06 - San Francisco hotel workers announce that their union, UNITE HERE Local 2, has reached agreement on a new contract with the city's leading hotels, after two strike votes, a strike, a lockout, and negotiating for over two years.  The union acheived its major goals, including card-check neutrality to make it easier for workers in non-union hotels in San Francisco and San Mateo Counties to join the union.  Workers won substantial wage and benefit increases, and defeated an attempt to make them accept a two-tier arrangement giving new workers a lower standard.  The union accepted no  concessions. 

PROTESTING THE SHERIFF'S COOPERATION WITH IMMIGRATION AGENTS

PROTESTING THE SHERIFF'S COOPERATION WITH IMMIGRATION AGENTS

OAKLAND, CA - 21FEBRUARY17 - Immigrant rights organizations marched through downtown Oakland to the office of Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahearn, to protest the cooperation of the Sheriff in the Priority Enforcement Program and Urban Shield programs of the Federal government, which target immigrants for detention and deportation.  President Trump has announced he will reauthorize the 287g program for cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and immigration authorities, which has led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people.

 Full selection of photos:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72157678803057331

THE POWER OF IMMIGRANT WELCOMING CONGREGATIONS

THE POWER OF IMMIGRANT WELCOMING CONGREGATIONS
Photoessay by David Bacon
The Progressive, February 1, 2017
http://progressive.org/magazine/on-the-line-test/

Five years ago, the Reverend Deborah Lee of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity began organizing church vigils outside the West County Detention Center in Richmond, California. Vigil participants have won the ability to meet with detainees inside the prison, offered sanctuary, and have found legal help for families.

"Solidarity is our protection," says Reverend Lee. "We ask faith communities to consider declaring themselves 'sanctuary congregations' or 'immigrant-welcoming congregations.'"

In 2011 people of faith began holding a vigil outside the West County Detention Center, where immigrants are incarcerated before being deported.

A Jewish activist blows the shofar, or ram's horn, outside the detention center, as a call to resist oppression and as part of a prayer service called during a time of communal distress.

One vigil was sponsored by members of the Unitarian Universalist Church, which developed a slogan for its work to halt deportations, "Standing on the Side of Love." 

A refugee from Central America is comforted outside the detention center where her brother was still being held by a member of St. John's Episcopal Church in Berkeley, which has given sanctuary to families threatened with deportation.

The Reverend Izzy Alvaran, who gained asylum from the Philippines a decade ago, leads protesters in a chant outside the detention center.

 A Vietnamese refugee describes his personal experience as part of a protest against the denial of amnesty to Central American families, outside the detention center where many are held. 

Civil rights veteran Rev. Phil Lawson leads demonstrators during the detention center vigil in a call and response prayer.

A woman begins to weep while talking about the experiences that forced her and her family to leave their home in Mexico, in a detention center vigil organized by Mujeres Unidas y Activas (United and Active Women), an organization of immigrant women in San Francisco and Oakland.

Reylla Denis Ferraz Da Silva, her husband Fabricio, and baby Enzo Gabriel.  Reylla was picked up for deportation by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, despite the fact that she was nursing Enzo, and had been living in San Francisco for eight years as she trained to become a church pastor at the Message of the Peace Church. 

THE BORDER WALL, IN PHOTOGRAPHS AND MUSIC

THE BORDER WALL, IN PHOTOGRAPHS AND MUSIC
Book review by David Bacon

Border Cantos
Photographs and text by Richard Misrach
Instruments, sound installations, scores, and text by Guillermo Galindo
Introduction and epilogue by Josh Kun
Published by Aperture, April 2016
274 pages, including gatefolds; 257 four-color images
Hardcover, $75

Reviewed in Afterimage, v.44, n. 4, January 2017
http://vsw.org/afterimage/afterimage-vol-44-no-4/


“I was born in Guatemala. My mother, who’d gone to work in the US, was deported back home. Later she returned to the U.S., and sent for me and sister Gaby. We were 12 and 10 years old. My uncle sent us off with a group crossing the border at Nuevo Laredo. I had my Bible with me, and I thought, I have faith. They took us to a part of the desert, and at night we all began to walk.

 “We were going to see my mom, so we packed our favorite clothes. You’re supposed to have dark clothes that aren’t visible, but Gaby wore her best bright white pants. The group huddled around to hide her. There was a sense that they had to protect the kids. After walking we had to cross the river, and took off our clothes to wade through the water. One of my shoes was swept away, and a lady gave me hers. Then we had to run, and at the end her feet were all cut up. But we were so glad we made it.”

—Lucia Pedroza

“I came to the US with a coyote. It cost me $2000 to cross the line. I took a bus to Naco, Sonora. We spent three days in an empty house, sleeping on the floor, men and women together. I was worried by all the stories I’d heard about women getting raped. Then one afternoon the coyote took us down into a ravine. We climbed into a pipe, crawling on hands and knees, one person behind the next.

 “The pipe was only about four feet around, with sewage running at the bottom. It was very dark, and the coyote warned us not to go off to the side or we’d get lost. I was very scared, but I needed to make it across. I prayed to the saints. I arrived in Lumberton, North Carolina, on a Saturday, went to mass and gave thanks to God on Sunday, and went to work in the fields on Monday. With the first money I made I bought a saint and gave him to the church there.”

—Guadalupe Marroquin


These women, two of the millions who’ve crossed the border between the United States and Mexico in the last two decades, describe this perilous journey as they lived it. For them, the border is not just geography, or a wall or a river. It is a passage of fire, an ordeal that must be survived in order to send money from work in the US back to a hungry family, to find children and relatives from whom they have been separated by earlier journeys, or to flee an environment that has become too dangerous to bear.

Some do not survive, dying as they try to cross the desert or swim the Rio Bravo, or murdered by gangs in northern Mexico. To them the border region has become a land of death.

But the border is also a land of the living. Over the past half century the once-small towns of Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana have become cities of millions. A huge part of the industrial workforce of southern California, South Texas and New Mexico lives and works, not on the US side of the border, but on the Mexican side and is part of the production and supply chain that delivers products to US consumers. There people build homes out of cardboard and shipping pallets cast off by the factories—the maquiladoras. The dirt streets of their barrios often end at the border wall itself. Many neighborhoods have no sewers and flood when it rains. Electricity is stolen by hooking up to power lines, while drinking water comes in a truck, and people must pay to fill the tank in front of their homes.

The border is the scene of some of Mexico’s sharpest social struggles. In Maclovio Rojas, outside Tijuana, land occupiers fight the police in sight of the border wall for the right to build homes. Workers in Juarez’s factories organize independent unions, and when they’re fired they set up tent encampments, like Occupy, at the gates. This upsurge is not new—it’s been going on for more than a hundred years. In 1906 Colonel William Greene, owner of the huge copper mine in Cananea, just a few miles south of Arizona in Sonora, brought the Arizona Rangers across the border to put down a strike now considered the first conflict of the Mexican Revolution. Mexican unions sent organizers north across the border to help Texas farmworkers organize their first unions in the Rio Grande Valley in the 1930s.

The border is a vast area with a vibrant social history. Over the past three decades it has also become a powerful social symbol, especially the wall that’s been built in fits and starts, underlining the separation of our two countries. The border played a big part in electing Donald Trump president, whose campaign rallies featured chants of “Build the Wall!” and promises to deport millions of people. Mexicans angry at the wall’s symbolism—Keep out!—and at their own President Enrique Peña Nieto for not challenging Trump’s campaign insults of Mexicans, may well dump Peña’s political party in the next election.

So people in the US need to understand what goes on at the border. This country needs a reality check about the wall, as one element of coming to terms with the sources of migration and protecting the human rights of migrants and working people generally. Richard Misrach is one of a number of photographers who have sought to present that reality. Over several trips to the border between 2009 and 2015 he took photographs of the wall and its environs. In the course of that work, he developed a collaboration with musician Guillermo Galindo. Together they created a book of photographs, Border Cantos, and a website where people can hear Galindo’s music, bordercantos.com.

Both the book and the website are the products of a great deal of work. Border Cantos is a very large book (approximately 13 x 11 inches). Some 185 of its 274 pages are given to Richard Misrach’s photographs taken along the border. The last part consists of photographs of instruments Galindo has created from objects found in the area near the border wall. The website features twenty-two of his works created on these instruments, from twenty seconds to over four minutes in length.

One of Galindo’s instruments is the Ropófono. “This loom,” he says, “a powerful symbol of home and tradition in Latin America, rotates a loop of discarded clothing. Contact microphones mounted on three arms amplify the sound of the clothing as it rotates” (200). Here Galindo is seeking to connect with the culture of the migrants who are crossing, and to create a sound—that of clothing—they might have heard as they were walking through the desert. It is a way, he believes, to create a voice for people who passed that way— who might have survived the experience, but who also might have perished in the crossing.

This is not the same, however, as listening to the actual voices of migrants themselves, at least those who survived, like Pedroza and Marroquin. It is important to hear those voices also, and to understand the concrete experience of a border crosser. But it is perfectly legitimate for Galindo, as an artist, to use physical pieces of that experience to create what is both a work of art and a tribute to the human beings involved. When you listen to the different instruments on the website, one after another, they create a broad texture, making the listener consider the ways the sounds connect to the experience.

Misrach’s photographs (other than the ones of the instruments) are mostly full-page color plates, with occasional collages of multiple smaller images. They are divided into eight chapters, or “cantos.” The first and largest shows the border wall as it crosses the desert and other remote locations. Two focus on the Border Patrol’s mechanisms of enforcement—the detritus left on shooting ranges and the tires dragged across the sand to reveal the tracks of migrants who later walk through the area. Two sections are images of the remnants of passing migrants—strange sculptural effigies in the vague shapes of people and cast-off and lost articles from backpacks to tennis shoes. One section shows the water containers left by activists who put them in the desert in hopes that migrants suffering thirst and heat prostration will find them. Another “canto” contains photographs of the wall as it passes through urban areas. The last, “The Other Side / El otro lado” has images of Mexico shot through the bars or mesh of the wall itself.

The first section contains the best-known images—the iron bars of the wall as it snakes through the desert, up and down hillsides. They are carefully framed compositions requiring substantial investments of time, repeatedly using perspective to dramatize the relation between the wall and the land. Misrach creates stark landscapes, devoid of people (as are most of his images). In many, the wall seems overwhelmed by its surroundings, a line of bars or obstacles made small in a much larger environment. As it presently exists, the wall is only a few decades old, in its oldest sections. Already even the newer wall of twenty-foot iron bars is rusting. This is not the Great Wall of China—it’s clear this wall is not a work for the ages. Nor is it a great accomplishment of human labor or engineering. Building it clearly didn’t produce many jobs. Skilled construction workers—electricians, pipefitters, and bridge builders—were not needed here.

The images reinforce an understanding that the wall’s main importance is its symbolism—its ability to win higher budgets for the Department of Homeland Security and votes for Donald Trump. Given that about 4.5 million Mexican migrants lived in the US in 1990, and 12.7 million by 2008, the wall had almost no impact on stopping migration across the border, despite its catastrophic human cost.

Some of Misrach’s images, especially the wide panoramas, are reminiscent of those shot by other photographers. Images by Mark Klett, Victoria Sambunaris, and Alec Soth, included in a 2012 San Francisco Museum of Art show titled Photography in Mexico: Selected Works from the Collections of SFMOMA and Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, all consider the border as landscape. In others, Misrach shows the wall’s absurdity and irrationality. Wall, Near Brownsville, Texas (2013) is one of several that show a fragment of wall in the middle of nowhere. Clearly someone could just walk around one end or the other. In another photograph, the wall runs through a Texas golf course, but with openings and missing sections so golfers can play through. Missing from the book, though, are images of those sections of the wall, like those in San Ysidro or El Paso, where the border is like a military installation, with high-intensity lights, multiple barriers, and lots of Border Patrol agents in SUVs.

The photographs of Border Patrol detritus—spent shells and perforated targets on a shooting range, or chained tires—don’t really convey the reasons why migrants fear the “migra.” In another section, one photograph does show a street in Nogales, Arizona, from which Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, while standing on a street in Nogales, Sonora, was shot  by a Border Patrol agent through the bars of the wall. Misrach’s two images of this same section of the wall show small posters of Rodriguez pasted onto the bars on the US side, but for some reason neither photograph was taken at the place where the shooting actually occurred, where Mexicans have erected a memorial on the street below.

Nevertheless, Misrach shows, with both target range and Nogales images, that militarization has a terrible human cost. Further, Misrach shows his support for the efforts made by US activists to save migrants from dying of thirst, with a section of images of water containers left in desert. Some show the hatred motivating those who’ve shot holes into the containers, draining out their precious water.

The section that ties the photographer to the musician contains images documenting the items discarded by migrants. “The stories behind these artifacts—who left each one behind and why—will forever remain a mystery,” Misrach says (145). Some were used by Galindo to make the instruments pictured in the book’s last section. It is an exercise in forensics, trying to see the people in what they leave behind, without seeing the people themselves, hearing their voices only in the instruments made from their discarded possessions. “There are many reasons why I refuse to consider my pieces recycled art objects,” Galindo says. “The instruments for the Cantos project are meant to enable the invisible victims of immigration to speak through their personal belongings” (193). Presumably Misrach takes these photographs for the same reasons. But the people are invisible in this book by the choice of the photographer. He has deliberately decided to take photographs of the land and objects, revealing human presence in most cases only by implication.

The last section of photographs, “The Other Side / El otro lado,” consists of images of Mexico and Mexicans, taken through the bars of the wall themselves. It highlights the two main limitations in Misrach’s approach to the border. This is the only section of the book, with a few exceptions, that contains images of people. And the images are almost all taken (as are almost all the images in the book) on the US side of the border. In this last section we see people through the bars as though they were prisoners in Mexico. They have no personality. Why not go across and talk with them?

Border Cantos does not pretend to be a sociological study of the border, or to document the reasons why people migrate, their living conditions, or social struggles in the border area on the Mexican side. But the reader does come away wondering why Misrach had so few images taken from that side. What does the wall look like to the people living south of it? Even the phrase “el otro lado” is very common in Mexico, but refers to the US side, not, as Misrach uses it, to refer to Mexico. Mexican photographer Leopoldo Peña, who photographs migrant indigenous Mexican communities in Los Angeles, asks, “What separation is the photographer [Misrach] suggesting when he does not allow the other side of the border to emerge?”

There is a long history of artists interpreting the border-crossing experience. In San Francisco, Pearl Ubungen developed a public dance performance, Refugee (1995), as a political challenge to the denial of immigrant rights. At one point she dances among wet concrete blocks along a rope pulling her from one place (or one country) to another. In another scenario, a section of the border wall on wheels chases, and is chased by, both migrants and border patrol agents.

The wall itself has been used for some years for art protesting the death of migrants, or highlighting the migrant experience. In the first years of the mass deaths of Operation Gatekeeper, at the end of the 1990s, Tijuana artists made sculptures of the plastic water bottles left in the desert to rescue migrants. They placed them on the wall itself with crosses and the names of people found dead in the wilderness. Other artists, myself included, have used the wall for public exhibitions, mounting large photographic prints on the bars showing the lives of migrants on the US side. This has been done only on the Mexican side, since the US Border Patrol prevents such displays, and often even simple access, on their side of the barrier.

Misrach has had several museum exhibitions of the Border Cantos images. The photographs deserve broader venues, however, with diverse audiences, if they are to have a strong social impact. And if, as Galindo desires, his music is to “enable the invisible victims of immigration to speak,” (193) where can they find an audience of listeners willing to act to change social reality? A gallery or museum interested in the commodification of art is not a place where a large audience will be found that is committed to an active fight to stop the abuse and death of migrants at the border.

Border Cantos can be a powerful tool to inspire that action if it reaches those people prepared to act. The need for this is undebatable. The US has a new President who says he is building an even bigger wall on the border, and who threatens to imprison and deport millions of people who have crossed it. It is more important than ever to understand what that wall means to the people who’ve encountered it.


DAVID BACON is a California writer and photographer and author of Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) and the forthcoming In the Fields of the North/En los campos del norte (UC Press/Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2017), among other books.

NOTES 1. Lucia Pedroza, interview by author, Omaha, NE (September 24, 2016). 2. Guadalupe Marroquin, interview by author,  Tar Heel, NC (July 7, 2011). 3. Leopoldo Peña, interview by author, Berkeley, CA (July 22, 2016).

PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION - TRABAJAMOS / WE WORK - IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH

PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION - TRABAJAMOS / WE WORK - IN THE FIELDS OF THE NORTH - Photographs by David Bacon, Riverside Art Museum